Korean Contemporary Art has gained escalating international interest among art lovers, collectors and critics in recent years and has been playing an important role in today’s contemporary art circuit. This Summer, Times Square is very much honored to organize in its second year, the Korean Contemporary Art Exhibition, which will be featured the three most innovative and challenging Korean contemporary artists Yoo Young-Wun,Mioon and Shin Chi-Hyun showcasing their latest art creations at Times Square Open piazza and Atrium from 26 July to 21 August. This exhibition not only serve as an introduction to Korean’s power of art, but also seek to create a dialogue of cultural exchange, inviting audience to get to learn about the movement and new explorations of Korea’s dynamic contemporary art scene. Times Square is also delighted to have the three artists visiting Hong Kong to inaugurate the exhibition opening ceremony together with the Consulate-General of the Republic of Korea on 26 July 2011.
In this Exhibition, Yoo will feature his prints sculpturesalong with Mioon’s digital media art and Shin’s 2 gigantic steel sculptures. Yoo’ s works present a critical reflection on mass media which controls our consumption society. The artist awakens the viewers to the true nature and attributes of mass media whose function lies in the expanded reproduction of what everyone already knows, or this special kind of public sphere which manipulates and processes what people think and feel in consumer society. His character sculptures using printed images and texts capture the social being called mass media as a physical entity. The artist sees prints like magazines and leaflets as the materials representing mass media and uses them as the skin of his sculptural pieces.
Mioon, composes of two South Korean media artists: Minsun Kim and Moonsun Choi, is one of the pioneer in Korean Media Art. Over the past few years, Mioon have created artwork with different digital media including film, video, photography and installations, gaining the international reputation among media art artists. This time, Mioon brings to us “Contingent Rule” media art, which is an imaginary forest consists of growing trees linking their lives with the stock market, when the stock market is good the trees will grow better. The concept behind is that Mioon views graphs, data, and indexes in the stock market are the core of capitalist economy, reflecting not only stock price changes within specific industries, but also political, environmental, and international situations and changes. Through this work they want audience to see how things affect relationship among living things, human and society.
The two “Walking Man” sculptures Shin showcases this time are composed of parts of the human body, that are similar to shadow puppets from childhood. Through the works, Shin would like to point out the change of the times, which is why sculptors in the digital era have come to create qualitatively different ‘monsters’ with computer programs while sculptors in the analog era represented objects from nature such as rocks, bronze, woods etc. Today, sculptors have been absorbed in making inherent shapes of things transmuted by computer monitors against the mystery of nature based on an austere proportion. The oddly-shaped things Shin creates are only possible in the environment where computers have led, which means new circumstances for creation, a period advent of image composition that looks like nothing is impossible.
The three talented artists together created a portrait of today’s Korean Contemporary art scene. The dynamism and diversity of these works attests to the ways in which artists explore their position between tradition and modernity in a fast developing society and an ever changing world. This exhibition will sure allow Hong Kong people to have an opportunity to appreciate Korean Contemporary Art and to be inspired and impressed by the evoking works of the artists.
